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men there was a huge banner. It bore a picture of the face of the younger man, and the words KEEPING THE PAST IN THE PAST.
    “What about the law?” someone was asking. An agreement had been signed: any traveler who reached this country and asked for protection had a right to a fair hearing.
    “A bill has been drafted, and will be introduced in the House tomorrow. Once passed, it will take force from nine o’clock this morning. The land within twenty kilometers of the bridge will, for the purposes of the Act, no longer be part of this nation. People entering the exclusion zone will have no basis in law to claim our protection.”
    Confused, Ali muttered, “Chi goft?” A young man sitting nearby turned to face him. “Salaam, chetori? Fahim hastam.”
    Fahim’s accent was unmistakably Khurosani. Ali smiled. “Ali hastam. Shoma chetori?”
    Fahim explained what the man on the TV had said. Anyone emerging from the mouth of the bridge, now, might as well be on the other side of the world. The government here would accept no obligation to assist them. “If it’s not their land anymore,” he mused, “maybe they’ll give it to us. We can found a country of our own, a tribe of nomads in a caravan following the bridge across the desert.”
    Ali said nervously, “My interview was today. They said something about nine o’clock—”
    Fahim shook his head dismissively. “You made your claim months ago, right? So you’re still covered by the old law.”
    Ali tried to believe him. “You’re still waiting for your decision?”
    “Hardly. I got refused three years ago.”
    “Three years? They didn’t send you back?”
    “I’m fighting it in the courts. I can’t go back, I’d be dead in a week.” There were dark circles under Fahim’s eyes. If he’d been refused three years before, he’d probably spent close to four years in this prison.
    Fahim, it turned out, was one of Ali’s roommates. He took him to meet the other twelve Khurosanis in Stage Two, and the whole group sat together in one of the huts, talking until dawn. Ali was overjoyed to be among people who knew his language, his time, his customs. It didn’t matter that most were from provinces far from his own, that a year ago he would have thought of them as exotic strangers.
    When he examined their faces too closely, though, it was hard to remain joyful. They had all fled the Scholars, like him. They were all in fear for their lives. And they had all been locked up for a very long time: two years, three years, four years, five.
    In the weeks that followed, Ali gave himself no time to brood on his fate. Stage Two had English classes, and though Fahim and the others had long outgrown them, Ali joined in. He finally learned the names for the European letters and numbers that he’d seen on weapons and machinery all his life, and the teacher encouraged him to give up translating individual words from Persian, and reshape whole sentences, whole thoughts, into the alien tongue.
    Every evening, Ali joined Fahim in the common room to watch the news on TV. There was no doubt that the place they had come to was peaceful and prosperous; when war was mentioned, it was always in some distant land. The rulers here did not govern by force, they were chosen by the people, and even now this competition was in progress. The men who had sent the soldiers to block the bridge were asking the people to choose them again.
    When the guard woke Ali at eight in the morning, he didn’t complain, though he’d had only three hours’ sleep. He showered quickly, then went to the compound’s south gate. It no longer seemed strange to him to move from place to place this way: to wait for guards to come and unlock a succession of doors and escort him through the fenced-off maze that separated the compound from the government offices.
    James and Reza were waiting in the office. Ali greeted them, his mouth dry. James said, “Reza will read the decision for you. It’s about ten pages,